THE WORLD

THE WORLD; Hate Was Just an Ember, But Oh, So Easy to Fan

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: January 17, 1993

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina—
THE tears came suddenly to Dragica, as though all else the old woman had endured, the shelling and the hunger and the cold, were not as hurtful as the hatred of a neighbor. "He stood there and screamed: 'All you Serbs in Sarajevo will end up getting your throats cut! And when we've done for you, we'll go to Serbia, and cut all their throats, too!' "

The neighbor, a Muslim in his mid-30's, had been friendly for years, inviting the old woman and her husband over for meals on Muslim festive days, accepting their return invitations to Christmas. But it was summer in Sarajevo, 1992, and Velesici, their neighborhood, was being bombarded hourly by shells fired by Serbian nationalists besieging Sarajevo. The neighborhood was predominantly Muslim. Many civilians died.

Later, the angry neighbor was killed while serving with Bosnian forces attempting to punch a breach in the Serbian siege lines on Zuc, a strategic height overlooking Sarajevo. After the burial, the elderly Serbs cooked a hot meal and crossed the muddy patch between the houses to share their fare with the Muslim man's widow and her two children. They cried together, for what all had lost in the war. But even now, for Dragica, there has been no easing of the pain from those bitter summer words, unrepented by the neighbor before he died.

Comprehending the hatred that has propelled the Bosnian war is difficult. Now that so much blood has been spilled -- at least 150,000 dead and missing in nine months, at least as many again seriously wounded -- no day passes without jarring encounters with the ugly stereotypes that each warring party has constructed for the other, at once justifying the relentless killing and impelling the killers to still more merciless violence.

To the Serbian gunners destroying Sarajevo, the Muslims predominant in the city are "Turci" (Turks), conquerors and rulers of Bosnia for 400 years, plotting to set up an Islamic state. Among Muslim fighters, Serbs are "Chetniks," the bearded killers who marauded across Bosnia in World War II, cutting Muslim throats, and the fathers and grandfathers to the current Serbian nationalists. Croats are condemned by Serbs, and Muslims, as "Ustashe," the fascist quislings whose World War II concentration camps rivaled Hitler's.

Yet the people who speak with such casual hate, Serbian gunners who fire tank cannons at apartment buildings and Muslim fighters who lock Serbian fighters in abandoned nightclubs and set them on fire with gasoline, recount memories of childhoods and adolescences and adulthoods spent in harmony with the people they now lust to kill. Here, "Many of my best friends were Muslims," or "My sister married a Serb" are not codes for a covert disdain. They are a statement of the overwhelming circumstance of life before the war.

When Maj. Gen. Lewis W. MacKenzie of Canada, the United Nations commander here for the first months of the war, ended his assignment with weary remarks about the irreducible hatreds, he was describing at least part of the truth. It is a truth that has had much to do with discouraging the outside military intervention that so many Bosnians, Muslims in particular, have sought, because it has persuaded powerful people in Washington, London and other capitals that sending forces here would be to plunge into a cesspool of atavism and vengeance. Memories of Better Days

But the larger truth is that Bosnians, the great majority at least, lived together after World War II without strains, at least without strains of an overtly religious or nationalistic kind. At least 30 percent of all marriages were mixed, and there was almost no apartment block where Serbs and Muslims and Croats did not live side by side. Children went to school and played together and hardly knew or cared about the entry their parents made under "nationality" in their identity cards.

What changed this was the collapse of Communism, and the emergence of nationalist parties to fill the void. Ambitious men like Radovan Karadzic, the psychiatrist who leads Bosnia's Serbian nationalists, sprang up with programs to kindle the embers of old resentments.

In Bosnia, there was a deep pool to draw upon, going far beyond World War II, back to the Turkish occupation in the 15th century that established Sarajevo as a predominantly Muslim city. Gordana Knezevic, associate editor of Oslobodjenje, the Sarajevo newspaper that has survived thousands of Serbian shells, recalls learning in childhood about the wartime Ustashe, who slaughtered tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Serbs. She learned, too, about the defeat of the Serbs at Kosovo Field in 1389 that sealed the suzerainty of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans and made the Orthodox Christian Serbs in Bosnia a tolerated underclass in a society ruled by Muslims.

But none of this, Mrs. Knezevic believes, would have been decisive without nationalist politicians. "These things slumbered in the hearts of many Serbs, but it took an industry of hate to revive them," she said. The efforts of men like Mr. Karadzic and his mentor in Belgrade, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, were aided by the emergence of counterpart parties among the Croats, and, more important, the Muslims. In the 1990 elections, their campaigning did nothing to allay anxieties among Bosnian Serbs that the days of the Ustashe might return. Consequences of Hate

Now the consequences of a politics of hate are there for all to see, and many Bosnians admit deep shame at having voted nationalists into power. They worry whether any outcome of the war, even a Western military intervention that broke the Serbian military machine, could foster conditions that would make it possible for Bosnia to be put back together as a multi-ethnic "citizen's state," the option proclaimed by the Bosnian Government of President Alija Izetbegovic.

There are others determined to see that the possibilities of harmony between Muslims, Serbs and Croats are destroyed for generations. When 53 Bosnian victims of the war were returned to Sarajevo in a body exchange with the Serbian forces two weeks ago, three of the Muslim soldiers had been decapitated, apparently while still alive, and the throat of one women who showed signs of having been sexually abused had been cut.

To an outsider, it seemed puzzling that the Serbian forces would provide such seemingly compelling evidence of atrocities, but Ademir Kenovic, a Muslim film director who has been keeping a film archive of some of the excesses, said he found nothing surprising in it. "Don't you see?" he said. "They want to provoke our hatred. They want to make sure that they destroy all possibility of a common life, so that in the end even Muslims will agree that Bosnia must be divided."

Photo: A policeman killed last month on a street in Sarajevo, a victim of Serbian shelling. About 150,000 are dead or missing in the fighting. (Jon Jones/Sygma)